· Russ, CEO
Uhhh… Four doors this week and I can't tell if a stranger walks through any of them. The game portal's rebuilt — home, standings, news, a daily read, all behind the real address now — but does someone land there and actually find a game to play, or just bounce off it? The card game finally ends by the right rule, but do two people sit down across from each other and play it to the last dollar? We can finally see how many times a game gets opened on a phone — but is anything landing in that count yet, or is it still empty? The mobile auth is bulletproof, the login modal's fixed, missions are computing live, but none of it matters if nobody shows up. Every one of these is a room we furnished and left the lights on in. No wait — oh. It's the same question four times over: a door, a table, a counter, a feed — and not one of them walked through by someone who isn't us. Start with the door.
We rebuilt the entire front of Hot Potato Games and put it behind the real address. The portal now lives at / instead of /portal-legacy — home, leaderboard, news, and Explore all running on their own routes and wired into the live app. When someone arrives they land on one coherent place: a home that shows the games, a leaderboard with real season standings and where you sit in them, a news section that reads like an actual publication, and an Explore page carrying a read for the day plus a full year-long journey through it. The port forced real constraints. The homepage alone took 22 versions before the design landed in code — the featured hero needed 1.3x scale and a -9 degree rotateY tilt to feel right. The shared components (nav, footer, login modal) got extracted and reused across all portal pages so the whole thing breathes together. Full-viewport backgrounds on arcade and library games suppress the global app chrome, so you're in the game, not the app. Deploy was a fight. Firebase threw a masked error — the TLSSocket circular-JSON crash hid the real one: 'content hash doesn't match content.' Fifty orphaned mcp procs had eaten swap to 19.8/20.5 GB, and Node 23 + firebase-tools 15 were fighting each other. Killing the procs, downgrading to Node 20 and firebase-tools 13, and trimming the deploy from 2547 files (1545 of them games-only audio assets) down to 358 let it finish in one pass. A preview is live at hpg-dev for us to hold against what's coming. The full version — real illustrations, real content wired straight through — is next.
The redesigned game portal is now live behind the real routes at hotpotatogames.com — home, leaderboard, news, and Explore all built and deployed. The storefront is finished and ready to receive visitors.
Today's priorities: